


Dummys and Daggers

by FabCatMeowz



Category: Original Work
Genre: Assassins, Blood, Daggers, Dark, I cringe at my old works, I'm considering orphaning this, Insanity, Inspired by an Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim quest, Kinda old, More Blood, Murder, Nightmares, No pun intended, Now that I think about it that might be wrong but oops too late, Other, dummys, dummys as in for training, how did my happy little mind manage to create this, look at these loooong tags XD, narrator is NOT me, oceans of freaking blood, reference to Grelod the Kind, yes I meant to spell dummys that way, you might like it tho
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-15
Updated: 2016-12-15
Packaged: 2018-09-08 17:12:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8853478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FabCatMeowz/pseuds/FabCatMeowz
Summary: A story about a girl who is forced to join a group of assassins, and her descent into darkness.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [M_jelly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/M_jelly/gifts).



> Be prepared for a dark and kinda depressingish story
> 
> If you don't like blood plz go back 
> 
> My phone won't let me make line breaks so be prepared for one long ass paragraph
> 
> My writing style is kinda formal so bear with me kiddos
> 
> (Eyyyy it's my first Ao3 upload ever so I hope ya like it)

It was a cool autumn afternoon, and I was walking home from school by myself as was the usual routine. As I strolled along the cracked sidewalks, a cold gust ripped past, blowing my papers out of my hands and into the street, where they were buffeted by the oncoming traffic, and ripped to shreds against windshields and under tires. My eyes widened as hours of hard work and research were demolished right in front of me. Seeing that there was nothing I could do, and not wanting to risk scavenging the busy street, I trudged the remainder of the way home. I figured that it was better that I lost my papers than if I were to lose my whole binder of schoolwork.  
As I walked up to my house, I noticed that the old oak door looked a bit different than it usually did. As I further approached it, I realised that my parents had most likely forgotten to close and lock the door. At the time, I assumed this was due to their elderly status, as they tended to forget things like this more and more lately.  
I walked through the doorway, jumping a bit at the unusually loud creak the heavy door made as I pushed past it. I deposited my books by a sofa chair which normally provided as a makeshift work station for me. They hit the ground with a thud which also seemed louder than usual. It was then that I put two and two together: it wasn’t that everything was louder, the whole house was much quieter. “Mom? Dad?” I called out. “I’m home! Where are you?” As I listened, I started to hear muffled speech from the guest room. The muffled sounds seemed distressed, and what confused me even more was that there were a few voices that I did not recognize.  
I walked into the guest room and what I saw made me jump from how startled I was. My eyes landed upon my parents, bound and gagged, tied to two chairs back to back which I then realised were missing from the dining room as I had walked past. Before I had time to even cry out for help, a large gloved hand clamped over my mouth from behind, and its twin came around to point a knife at my neck. My parents’ expressions went from semi-relieved to see me, to eyes widened in fear. I didn’t dare attempt to squirm away for fear of my life being taken by the cold unforgiving steel that could pierce my throat at the flick of a wrist.  
A second person came out from behind the door which I had only just opened a few minutes ago. It was strange how things could go from normal to dreadful in such a short amount of time. The second figure was wearing a dark low hood, thin cloth gloves, black boots that were unusually quiet, and a billowy cloak that fluttered silently around a tight-fitting black jumpsuit.  
When the ominous figure spoke, I recognised the voice to be a woman’s voice. She said that she was an assassin from a group which she wouldn’t specify, and that I had to join her or my parents would die slowly and painfully, and I would be forced to watch them suffer. Hearing this, my parents squirmed against their constraints, only to cease suddenly as a dagger flew between their heads and struck firmly into the wall. I decided that, even though my parents did not want to see me doing anything having to do with murders, but I knew I couldn’t bear to live knowing that my parents were dead because of me. I nodded slightly, indicating that I would go with the two hooded assassins.  
Before I knew what was happening, the knife was removed from its perch at my neck, and a slightly damp cloth swiftly covered my mouth and nose. As, I struggled to breath through the thick cloth, my thoughts became muddled and my senses, drowsy. I recalled something like this from science class. What was it called? I think it was chlorofo- I didn’t have time to finish the thought before I felt my legs collapse from under me and my whole world go black.  
I awoke confused and with an intense migraine. My body felt sore all over from when I blacked out and fell onto the hard wooden floor in the guest room of my house. As I shifted my weight off of my side, which was covered in blue and purple bruises from my unforgiving fall, I noticed that the texture of the floor was not that of wood, but rather old stone bricks that scratched against my elbows as I propped myself up causing me to wince. From my new position I was able to see that I was in a spacious but gloomy cell that had a splintering wooden door with a rectangular cut in the bottom, which I assumed was used for delivering rations of food and other necessities, and no other windows other than a cut-out window in the door with iron bars.  
I slowly managed to stand and limp over to the window. I peered through the casement and spot a guard posted outside of my cell, standing to the left of the cell door, so, to get his attention, I coughed into my hand rather more loudly than I had expected. The guard snapped his head to the side to identify where the sudden noise had come from. I could see for a split second that he was apparently rather startled, but it quickly became no more than a gleam in his eye by the time he had fully turned to face me.  
When I say he had a gleam in his eye, by which I mean this man was wearing an eyepatch over his right eye, and I could see a jagged scar running across his cheekbone that disappeared underneath the eyepatch. I thought to ask him how he got it, but it was more important that I figure out exactly what was going on, and why I was in that cell. Before I even managed to utter a word, he said in a gruff voice, “Well I suppose you’ll want to know what you’re doing here, eh?” Stunned that he seemed to have read my mind, I simply nodded in response. “We’ve been low on members lately, so, as of today, you’re going to be apprenticed to the lady named Ruby. I heard she’s the one who went and fetched you from that boring house of yours. I hear you’re surprisingly good at sneaking out of class to do last minute homework. Skills like that can be extremely useful when you’re an assassin.” He almost made it sound like the information of my capture was common knowledge among his comrades which made me wonder how much more they knew about me.  
Ruby, my mentor, made sure that training was brutal and difficult, it lasted most of the day, and, sometimes, I wondered if I would ever be ready to receive a contract. Not that I particularly wanted to kill anybody of course, but after each never-ending month that passed, the old me became shaped to the will of my superiors, and changed beyond recognition, to a point where I had become an entirely different person. I was taught to cast aside all emotions for the sake of our work, as I was trained in stealth, agility, strength, gore tolerance, information sapping, how to hide a body, poisons, weapon mastery, and even how to kill a target the most swiftly and efficiently.  
After seven agonizingly long months of ruthless training, I was finally given my first contract. It was an old woman named Eldina who was the head of an orphanage. According to the information given to me by Ruby, one of the little boys from the orphanage had somehow compiled enough money to be able to afford our services, and managed to contact one of our associates. Apparently, he wanted Eldina dead because of the cruel punishments she gave him and his friends from the orphanage. I snickered slightly at the thought of the punishments he underwent, me being numbed to pain, as it was part of my training, his reasoning seemed pathetic, but still, money was money, and I had no choice but to do my job.  
Clad in what would’ve otherwise appeared to be normal street-clothes, I wandered around alleyways close to the orphanage, planning escape routes in advance and discovering what would be the best place to hide myself, or the old lady’s corpse. I gathered information about events happening in the area, funerals in particular. I learned that there would be a small, private funeral of some insignificant man, who died of reasons I didn’t care to find out, in three day’s time. After all, a deep casket would be a fitting place to hide a body. Surely nobody would notice another body underneath the first, and nobody would dare to disturb the dead and buried. I figured three days would be all the time I needed in order to figure out what the old lady from the orphanage did on a daily basis, and perhaps, when she would leave the orphanage walls and unknowingly bring herself further and further into death’s unbreakable vise.  
After two days of snooping around and watching Eldina’s every move, I managed to form a schedule as to when she would exit the orphanage each day, the routes she took, and how long it took her to get back to the orphanage. A few hours before her evening errands, I intercepted a letter that caught me off guard completely. It read that Eldina would be travelling out of the country later that day in order to escape the “daily struggles of having to deal with those annoying brats from the orphanage.” This new information meant that I would have to change my plans completely. I couldn’t wait until the day of the funeral to kill her, and I knew it would be close to impossible to store a body for that long without the authorities finding out. I devised a new plan that seemed nearly superior to the original. I would lure her into the alleyway downhill from the orphanage, kill her swiftly, and make it look like she had committed suicide.  
Using the letter I intercepted, I prepared a note in Eldina’s handwriting and language style entailing her reasons for suicide. I watched as she stepped out of the orphanage doorway with her baggage at precisely when the letter had stated. I stepped out from around the sidewalk corner, impersonating one of the older girls at the orphanage that I happened to look like, knowing that if I managed to aggravate her enough, she would try to beat me. Once I had succeeded in flaring up her temper, she did, in fact, swing at me with her cane that she used to feign weakness around strangers who would assume such an old lady incapable of acting as cruelly as rumors implied. Before the blow could land, I sprung out of the way and took off at a pace that was a run just slow enough for her to be able to keep up as I lured her into my trap.  
Once I got her to where I wanted her, I quickly ducked behind an old dumpster that had just enough room behind it for me to squeeze between the filthy bent metal, and the wall of the tall brick building behind me. Using the fading daylight and tall building to my advantage, the otherwise obvious hiding spot became nearly invisible as my dark clothes blended in perfectly with my surroundings. Eldina called out, “Riley, you had better get your stupid hide back out here so I can give you a proper beating!” I assumed Riley was the name of the girl from the orphanage that I was impersonating.  
Slowly, I crept out from my hiding spot which, fortunately, happened to be in the opposite direction from which Eldina was currently facing. I unsheathed my dagger from the hidden sleeve in the lining of my hoodie’s pocket and quietly concealed it by holding it behind my forearm with the sharp end facing upward. Without so much as a shuffle of feet against the crumbling asphalt, I was already behind her plunging my dagger into her throat causing her to choke on her own blood, whilst shredding her vocal chords, preventing her from crying out. It was a method that we frequently practiced back in training by means of mannequin dummy stabbing. The method had become so routine for me that putting it into practice seemed almost like stabbing one of the dummies back in the lair.  
I looked down at my hands to find that they were covered in a deep crimson liquid that drip drip dripped in fat viscous drops. I left my dagger in the dummy’s throat and put its hand around the hilt, except this dummy’s name was Eldina. I stared down at my hands again. They were shaking violently. Why were they shaking? All I did was stab another dummy. I looked over at the dummy again, but this time I saw an old woman, crippled and lifeless against the bloodstained asphalt. The realization washed over me like a wave of crimson and black. This woman was dead. She was dead because of me. I did this. My eyes widened and I choked on a scream that tried to rip its way from my lips. I bit down hard on my tongue to hold back the sound that would alarm anyone within earshot.  
Once I finally calmed myself down with comforting thoughts telling me that I must have done the right thing, after all, she was horrible to those children, I managed to regain my senses and begin cleaning the remaining blood from my skin and clothing. Since my outfit was especially designed for liquids to bead up and roll off of it, I had no trouble shaking off the remaining blood droplets that spattered my clothing. The difficult part came when I had to clean the blood from my hands. Using a small package of wet wipes that I had previously stored behind the dumpster, I carefully cleaned the blood out from the shallow crevices in my hands. Once they were clean, I stored the used wipes in a plastic bag, and, with my now clean hands, placed the suicide note in the corpse’s breast pocket.  
Still feeling a bit shocked from the day’s occurrences, I returned to the lair under the cover of darkness and delivered the news to Ruby that I had fulfilled the contract. Once I arrived at the lair, I threw the used wipes, and the plastic bag they were in, into the incinerator. Feeling weary from the long and tedious job, I went straight to my room and, as soon as my face hit the mattress, I was fast asleep.  
That night, I was plagued by terrible nightmares of mannequins with human faces swimming effortlessly through seas of blood to get to me, but it seemed like the harder I tried to get away from them, the thicker the sea became, until I could no longer keep afloat, and I was dragged under the surface. As my eyes began to show only red and blood filled my lungs, I snapped awake in a cold sweat. My heart was beating out of my chest, and my breathing was fast and shallow as I recovered from the aftershock of that horrid nightmare.  
Every night since, I had the same nightmare, over and over again, I came to expect each event as it played out, but each time, it somehow seemed more horrible than the last. It got to a point where I was losing immense amounts of sleep because I didn’t want to have to suffer through the painful nightmare. My sleep loss began to show in my work too. I was more clumsy and forgetful. It got to a point when my lack of sleep prevented me from doing my job properly without doing something to mess it up. After I failed a few contracts, barely making my escape without getting caught, Ruby told me that I needed to leave so I wouldn’t end up getting caught and giving away secrets to the authorities, but I had to swear on my life never to tell anyone about my time as an assassin.  
I agreed that if I ever told someone that I would be slain by her very blade. Well, here I am now, telling my story. I suppose now it’s my turn to die.

**Author's Note:**

> PLOT TWIST!!!!!!!  
> Muahahahahahha sorrynotsorry


End file.
